When you write a screenplay, it’s good to summarise it in a single line. Why? It’s called the “pitch”, and it’s used to grab the attention of potential producers and get your screenplay made.
Stephanie Palmer suggests the following format for a pitch:
“My story is a (genre) called (title) about (hero) who wants (goal) despite (obstacle).”
So how am I voting in the EU Referendum? And can I summarise this complicated issue in a line, a pitch? Sure, such a summary will miss the nuance and subtlety. But sometimes that is helpful; it lets us see the wood and not the trees. We don’t get lost in a sea of stats. We boil things down to what really matters.
That said…
Tomorrow, I will be voting for the UK to leave the EU because I believe in the right to self-determination for all nations, and I think that the people of this country should be the ones who decide what happens in this country on all policy fronts, rather than being 1/9* of a larger polity with a different political and economic culture and history and language, and that the buck should stop with British politicians in a British parliament.
In short: my decision comes down to sovereignty. For me, everything else is just a distraction and an elaboration.
* The UK is around 1/8 the population of the EU, and has around 1/10 of the seats in the European Parliament, so 1/9 seems a reasonable fraction.
© 2016 Bryan A. J. Parry
featured image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32810887
The Doggerelizer 
Mere tribalism, friend. We here in the states have an occasional state start whining about secession, especially when they are inconvenienced by their role as part of a whole. But sovereignty is a will-o-the-wisp in a global marketplace–you can leave the union, but you can’t physically remove yourselves from your location–you can’t extricate yourself from your economic trading partners–and you’re being played by big corporations that benefit from more-piecemeal governmental power. Why not go full sovereignty and put Lizzie II back in charge? That’s how backward-looking your argument is.
Not really. The people of the UK being the ones who decide what happens in the UK is called “democracy”. Who said we want to extricate ourselves from our trading partners? We wish to carry on being allies of European nations but not be subsumed in a superstate. The right to national self-determination is a fundamental one and far from backward-looking.
It seems obvious to me that turning away is the loser move here–you need to drill down into and ‘game’ the Union, as a powerful member, not fragment off, giving away all leverage for change from within. If the EU is unfair, fix the EU. Be leaders.
I would agree with you, in fact. Unfortunately, it is impossible for one nation to fix it from within. We’ve tried for decades to do as you say, but with very limited success. It just hasn’t worked. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness, so runs that quote. And we’ve repeated ourselves so many times now, that to carry on doing so would strike me as madness.
Well, now we’ll see. I hope things work out for you all.
I hope so too!